The Cloven.

I had to finish B. Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, since I’m enough of a completionist that I can’t read the first two parts of a trilogy and not finish it. I really liked The Vorrh, the fever-dream opening novel that builds an incredible, dark, creepy world in a forest at the heart of Africa that is fighting back against German colonizers attempting to plunder its wood. Catling expanded the world in The Erstwhile with the strange maybe-alive creatures of the book’s title, but the story turned dramatically darker and graphically violent, to the point of abject cruelty, without really advancing the plots of the first book enough. The trilogy concludes with The Cloven, and unfortunately my fears from the second book were confirmed: Catling created a mesmerizing world, but he couldn’t resolve any of the plots. None of the various stories he opened up in The Vorrh gets anything close to a conclusion, and by the end of this third book, too much of the dark magic from the first book was gone.

The story in The Cloven mostly takes place in Essenwald, the German city next to the Vorrh, with brief passages back in England. Ghertrude and Cyrena return, as does Meta, while the Limboia – the natives who have had their minds largely wiped clean by the time they’ve spent in the Vorrh, making them something akin to slave labor – have returned to the forest for the time being. The Kin are also still here, and work alongside a character who makes a surprise re-appearance in this novel. All of the Erstwhile characters from the second book appear at least in passing, as do Oneofthewilliams and some form of the character Sidrus.

Catling brings them all back for one more go-round, but none of these storylines seems to go anywhere. Worst of all is how Catling has created this surreal world yet gives no explanation to any of its mysteries, or even a purpose to most of them. Who made the Kin, the so-called “Bakelite people” of the novels, or created the system that gives them power? What exactly was Ishmael, who isn’t quite human but lives in the world of men and is able to sire a child? What exactly is the Orm? What drives the Vorrh, and does it control the creatures within it or is it the other way around?

The first novel was an inventive playground of ideas that seemed to draw on millennia of myths from across the world, opening up numerous storylines that I assumed Catling would eventually draw together over the remainder of the series, but he does nothing of the sort. Many characters meet their ends in The Cloven, but it’s often in some ambiguous way and doesn’t seem to tie to the main story. Sidrus’ fate is especially gruesome and bizarre, deserving more explanation but getting none, and it contributed to my sense that Catling was too enamored of his ability to dream up new desecrations for the human form to focus on wrapping up any of the plot.

This could have been such a great series, a dark fantasy that depicted the horrors and depredations of colonialism through rich metaphor. Catling gave himself so many lanes in which to work, from the living forest and the Limboia who mine it to the use of characters’ vision (or blindness) as a recurrent image and theme. The fertile material of the first book in the trilogy merely makes the failure of the third book that much more disappointing.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.